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[Photo caption:] Shown above, left to right, are the Hardwick Woolen Mills with the Hardwick Stove Company directly behind it. In the center is the Dixie Foundry, another stove plant, with the Cleveland Chair Company to the right. The picture was taken from Fort Hill Cemetery.

Cleveland’s Industrial Skyline

RIGHT PAGE — “Cherokees’ Removal” Free Press Second Anniversary Edition By John Morgan Wooten

One of the most brutal chapters in American history today has to do with the removal of the Cherokee Indians from their homes in the area of which Chattanooga is now the center, to the Oklahoma plains.

A trail of death and suffering on the way followed on the heartbreak caused by forcible removal from the land which they had held for so many centuries.

These Indians suffered because they trusted the white man to be honorable and just in his dealings and loyal to his promises. They found the white man instead had been determined to grab their lands on any pretext, with as little bloodshed as possible, and had tricked them into abandoning their war equipment so they were helpless when the order for their removal came.

Preceding the removal, the whites carefully spread rumors that the Indians were planning an uprising and anonymous notes were received by white men in the Nation declaring that their lives were in danger. The Indians — not savages, but a Christianized people, more civilized than their white neighbors, replied:

“We have no military system, equipment or supplies, our instruments of war were buried long ago and the martial spirit of our people has disappeared. A futile and impossible revolution is not our thought.”

Thus the missionaries at Brainerd and others who spread the gospel of Christ among this genuinely great people and enlisted them then under the banner of the Prince of Peace caused them to be unable to defend themselves with the warlike prowess of their ancestors when they faced the white man’s ruthless order taking their homes away from them. This does not mean that the coming of the missionaries was not a blessing to the Cherokees; for had they kept their warlike spirit and attempted to save their homes by fighting for them, extermination would have been the certain result.

But even though history shows that to be true, its truth does not take from the shame of the wrongs committed against this civilized people.

The article herewith, written by John Morgan Wooten of Cleveland, gives a graphic, authentic account of the removal, the injustice of it frankly admitted, but with praise for the humaneness of Gen. Winfield Scott’s management of the long overland journey.

By John Morgan Wooten

I.

The Cherokees belonged to the great Iroquoian group and had at some remote time become detached from their kindred in the North.

Among the legends handed down in the tribe were stories of the Cherokees once having been driven by powerful enemies from their old home, and pushed southward. They inhabited the mountain sections of the South, and long before the coming of white men were firmly established in this region. Their burial mounds, some of them centuries old, their villages, built of substantial houses, and their cultivated fields, dotted the river valleys on the headwaters of Tennessee, Savannah and other streams.

An intricate system of trails or roadways, connected the towns and villages, wound along the numerous clear-flowing streams, climbed through the mountain passes to rich pri— [continues to next page]